The Religious and Philosophical Foundations and Apologetic Implications of George MacDonald's ...

35 Pages·2016·0.27 MB·English

Dissertation in Progress
In this section of North Wind the editor highlights new scholars who are
working on MacDonald at the Masters and Doctoral levels.
“The Religious and Philosophical Foundation and Apologetic
Implications of George MacDonald’s Mysticism” is a doctoral
dissertation in the subject of Christian Spirituality at the University of
South Africa.
The Religious and Philosophical Foundations and
Apologetic Implications of George MacDonald’s
Mysticism
Dean Hardy
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART ONE:
An Examination of George MacDonald’s Humble Beginnings
and External Influences
Chapter 1 George MacDonald: A Brief Biography
1.1 19th Century Scotland and Huntly’s Cultural and Religious
Milieu
1.2 The MacDonald Family
1.3 Other Influences on MacDonald’s Thought
1.3.1 Religious: F.D. Maurice, Alexander John Scott, Dante,
Origen
1.3.2 Philosophical: Plato, Plotinus, Schleiermacher, Kant,
Schelling, Fichte, William Paley
1.3.3 Mystical: Jacob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg, William
Law
1.3.4 Literary: Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Hoffman, and
Novalis
North Wind 34 (2015): 114-148
Religious and Philosophical Foundations 115
PART TWO:
George MacDonald’s Philosophy and its Affect on His Mysticism
Chapter 2 MacDonald’s Metaphysical Foundations
2.1 Living in a Shadow World, examining MacDonald’s
‘Temperamental Platonism’
2.2 Ex Deo: Origen, Plotinus and MacDonald’s doctrine of
Creation
2.3 “Participation” in the Divine Nature
Chapter 3 Alethiology & Language
3.1 A Contrast of Propositional Truth with the Embodiment of
Truth in Christ
3.2 MacDonald, Augustine, and Swedenborg: Symbols as the
Conduit of Divine Truth
Chapter 4 Epistemology and the Attainment of Knowledge
4.1 The Rejection of Plato’s Rationalism
4.2 Is there a Place for Empirical Science in MacDonald’s
thought?
4.3 F.D. Maurice and A.J. Scott: the primacy of Revelation
4.4 MacDonald’s View of the Status and Role of the Holy
Scriptures
Chapter 5 An Outworking of MacDonald’s Philosophy on his
Theology and Mysticism
5.1 Defining MacDonald as a ‘True Mystic’
5.2 MacDonald’s utilization of Swedenborg’s Theory of
Correspondences and Boehme’s Four Spiritual
Dimensions
PART THREE:
The Apologetics of George MacDonald
Chapter 6 Modern Implications for George MacDonald’s 19th
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Century Apologetic
6.1 An Overview of 19th Century Apologetic Strategies
6.2 An Overview of Current, 21st Century Apologetic Strategies
6.3 Was George MacDonald an Apologist?
6.3.1 Rationalism, Romanticism, and ‘Spiritual Logic’
6.4 An Analysis of MacDonald’s Intention, Purpose, and
Overall Apologetic Goals
6.4.1 Symbols and Imagination as Apologetic Methodology
6.4.2 Spiritual Duty and Intellectual Assent
6.4.3 The Problem of Suffering: Plato, Schleiermacher, and
MacDonald’s Theodicy.
6.5 The Application of MacDonald’s Apologetic to the
Spiritual Climate of this Age
Bibliography
Religious and Philosophical Foundations 117
N
ineteenth-century author George MacDonald has influenced
some of the greatest writers of the past century. G.K. Chesterton (1905)
stated, “George Macdonald was one of the three or four great men of 19th
century Britain.” He even went so far to explain, “I for one can really testify
to a book that has made a difference to my whole existence, which helped
me to see things in a certain way from the start; a vision of things which
even so real a revolution as a change of religious allegiance has substantially
only crowned and confirmed. Of all the stories I ever read . . . it remains the
most real, the most realistic, in the exact sense of the phrase the most like
life. It is called The Princess and the Goblin, and is by George MacDonald.”
The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature mentions that MacDonald’s
Princess and Goblin books were some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood
favorites, and even suggests, “The goblin mines beneath the Misty Mountains
in The Hobbit owe much to it” (Carpenter and Prichard 1999:427). C.S.
Lewis, on many occasions, identified MacDonald as his literary master and
admitted, “I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from
him” (Lewis 1947:xxxvii). Oswald Chambers went so far as to write “it is
a striking indication of the trend and shallowness of the modern reading
public that George MacDonald’s books have been so neglected” (Chambers
1995:35).
While George MacDonald maintained some national and even
international success during the later parts of his career, this changed after his
death in 1905. Likely due to the peculiarity and complexities of his work, his
notoriety wandered off of the edge of the literary map. Chesterton predicted,
“Dr. George MacDonald will be discovered some day . . . until then he will . . .
be neglected, contemned, and quarried industriously by people who wish to
borrow his ideas” (Chesterton 1905).
G.K. Chesterton was a prophet. In the last thirty years there has been
resurgence in the reading and subsequent scholarly research in the work of
George MacDonald. While there seems to be an overwhelming amount of
research from critics of the literary as well as the theological persuasion,
there is a striking lack of exploration from the mystical, philosophical, and
apologetic angle. These aspects of George MacDonald’s interior life are
usually disregarded.
While many scholars examine MacDonald through the lens of
literature or theology, it has yet to be found where a scholar has researched
his mysticism in any overt detail. G.K. Chesterton wrote of MacDonald,
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“When he comes to be more carefully studied as a mystic, as I think he will
be when people discover the possibility of collecting jewels scattered in a
rather irregular setting, it will be found, I fancy, that he stands for a rather
important turning-point in the history of Christendom” (2005:13). It is my
contention that Chesterton’s suggestion has yet to be fully realized. Whether
due to the anti-intellectualism that sometimes is associated with the study of
“spirituality,” or due to the complex nature of MacDonald’s views, the well
of his spiritual walk has been seldom tapped.
Even more interestingly, the lack of scholarship on MacDonald’s
mysticism can only be outdone by the absence of research on his underlying
philosophical ideas. This lack of scholarship caused researcher and
biographer Robert Trexler to write: “Not enough has been written of the
theological and political debates of the nineteenth century, especially an
exploration of the influence of MacDonald’s good friend and mentor, F.D.
Maurice, who, after John Henry Newman is probably the most influential
and prophetic theologian of the nineteenth century. However, the theological
issues of the nineteenth century, as important and under-studied as they have
been, still receive more attention than the philosophical debates upon which
they rest” (Trexler 2003, italics mine). It is this missing scholarship from the
philosophical, apologetic, and mystical angle that this study seeks to fulfill.
PART II
George MacDonald’s Philosophy and its Affect on his Mysticism
“Novalis has said: ‘Philosophy is really homesickness, an impulse
to be at home everywhere.’ The life of a man here, if life it be, and not the
vain image of what might be a life, is a continual attempt to find his place,
his center of recipiency, and active agency . . . [But] he is not at home; his
soul is astray amid people of a strange speech and a stammering tongue. But
the faithful man is led onward; in the stillness that his confidence produces
arise the bright images of truth; and visions of God, which are only beheld in
solitary places, and granted to his soul.”
—George MacDonald (1895:211-12)
Chapter Two
MacDonald’s Metaphysical Foundations
Section I: Living in a Shadow World: examining MacDonald’s
“Temperamental Platonism”
Religious and Philosophical Foundations 119
Section II: Ex Deo: Origen, Plotinus and MacDonald’s view of
Creation.
Section III: “Participation” in the Divine Nature
Introduction
The fact that the philosophy of MacDonald has rarely been
researched is not due to a lack of willing hearts or uneducated researchers. It
is likely due to the fact that even a tertiary student of MacDonald recognizes
that he had a negative attitude toward the discipline. Bruce Hindmarsh
stated that the “One thing he [MacDonald] never claimed to be . . . was a
theologian” (Hindmarsh 1991:55). Hindmarsh is correct, but in addition,
MacDonald also ignored the title of “philosopher” for the same reasons. This
researcher contends that the motives for which MacDonald disliked both
labels was not due to the disciplines in-and-of themselves, but rather the
outworking of these fields of study on the religious culture and the personal
spiritual lives of those who lived in the Victorian era. Thus, MacDonald’s
reasons for dismissing these disciplines will be elucidated, as well as his
belief that there is, in fact, a correct theology and philosophy.
MacDonald never publically placed himself into any theological
or philosophical system, and his reasons were primarily preventative and
reactionary. MacDonald himself said in a letter to his father, “I am neither
Arminian or Calvinist. To no system could I subscribe” (Beinecke: April
15, 1851) as well as saying “Jesus Christ is my theology, and nothing else”
(Anonymous 2012:31). One of the reasons why he never sought to proclaim
his systematized theology was that he was worried about being pigeonholed
into one system of belief. He writes in his sermon entitled “Light,” “But
if one happens to utter some individual truth which another man has made
into one of the cogs of his system, he is in danger of being supposed to
accept all the toothed wheels and their relations in that system” (MacDonald
2012a:250). MacDonald was concerned about being misconstrued and
misinterpreted, and encouraged others to also eschew choosing a system of
belief, “Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should
avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood;
its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its
truths, and hold them forth as its essence” (MacDonald 1882:332).
Philosophy and theology did much during the Victorian period
to divide and dis-unify the church until the body of Christ was barely
recognizable. MacDonald (2012b:69) contends:
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All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness,
have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the
hearts of the children. These wise and prudent, careful to make the
words of his messengers rime with their conclusions, interpret the
great heart of God, not by their own hearts, but by their miserable
intellects; and, postponing the obedience which alone can give
power to the understanding, press upon men’s minds their wretched
interpretations of the will of the Father, instead of the doing of that
will upon their hearts. They call their philosophy the truth of God,
and say men must hold it, or stand outside. They are the slaves of
the letter in all its weakness and imperfection,—and will be until the
spirit of the Word, the spirit of obedience shall set them free (italics
mine).
MacDonald concluded that to choose and broadcast a specific system or
denomination would simply cause more division and detract from the
gospel and the mere Christianity in which he advocated. MacDonald argued
that, “Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men, than
all the infidelity that has ever been spoken” (MacDonald 2009d:192). He
specifically pointed out the issue of divisiveness within the church: “The real
schismatic is the man who turns away love and justice from the neighbour
who holds theories in religious philosophy, or as to church-constitution,
different from his own; who denies or avoids his brother because he follows
not with him; who calls him a schismatic because he prefers this or that
mode of public worship not his” (MacDonald 2012b:80). This concept struck
close to MacDonald’s heart, for in the middle of the 19th century a small
schism in his church in Arundel had charged him with heresy that eventually
caused him to resign (Raeper 1987:90). Rolland Hein summarizes succinctly,
“MacDonald, who would ally himself with no system, scorns the sectarian
mentality that so vehemently expends its energies in futile clashes with those
of opposing opinions” (Hein 1989:98). MacDonald was simply concerned
that by proclaiming a philosophical or theological system, he’d be throwing
fuel on a fire that he longed to extinguish.
Thirdly, MacDonald truly believed that certain theologies, as well as
an obsession for theological deliberation, could actually detract from one’s
relationship with the Father and one’s duty to serve him. He argued that men
have a habit of spending too much time focusing on their theology, and not
enough on loving God and their fellow men, “Zeal for God will never eat
them up; why should it? He is not interesting to them: theology may be; to
Religious and Philosophical Foundations 121
such men religion means theology” (MacDonald 2012b:68). MacDonald
goes so far as to specifically state, “I firmly believe that people have hitherto
been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about
practice . . .” (Greville MacDonald 2005: 155).
Not only was MacDonald worried that an infatuation with theology
could poorly affect our praxis, but the theology itself could be faulty, and
thus one’s view of God could poorly influence our relationship with him.
Rolland Hein explains, “In many novels the chief deterrent to a successful
journey toward a spiritual maturity is contact with false ideas about God’s
character and manner of working in the world, particularly those fostered by
mean and popular versions of Calvinist doctrines” (Hein 1989:120). George
MacDonald did not pull punches when it came to certain theological beliefs;
for instance, he goes so far as calling the doctrines of atonement and eternal
torment, “doctrines of devils” (MacDonald 2012a,179). In Robert Falconer,
MacDonald took aim at Calvinism, the creed of his youth: “For now arose
within him, not without ultimate good, the evil phantasms of a theology
which would explain all God’s doings by low conceptions, low I mean for
humanity even, of right, and law, and justice, then only taking refuge in the
fact of the incapacity of the human understanding when its own inventions
are impugned as undivine. In such a system, hell is invariably the deepest
truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. Hence, as foundations must
be laid in the deepest, the system is founded in hell, and the first article in
the creed that Robert Falconer learned was, “I believe in hell” (MacDonald
2005:98).
There is also no doubt that MacDonald felt a calling to do damage
to the prevailing systems of his day. One of his purposes was to “deliver the
race from the horrors of such falsehoods, which by no means operate only
on the vulgar and brutal, for to how many of the most refined and delicate
of human beings are not their lives rendered bitter by the evil suggestions of
lying systems--I care not what they are called--philosophy, religion, society,
I care not?--to deliver men, I say, from such ghouls of the human brain, were
indeed to have lived!” (MacDonald 2002:38). He believed, categorically,
that Calvinism was a barricade to one’s relationship with God. The following
assessment will be helpful in understanding the spirit of MacDonald’s stance.
This review of one of MacDonald’s lectures in London from a direct, albeit
anonymous observer (Anonymous 2012:30-1), was originally published in
Christian World in 1882:
It is the breaking up of old habits of theological thought, or the
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exercise of a happy liberty in regard to it, that has prepared the way
for a preacher who avows himself, as Dr. MacDonald did on Sunday,
to be no theologian, but who feels that the truth of God is to be
reached in other ways than by a theological key. There ought, indeed,
to be nothing startling in this, for it is evident that souls did somehow
find the truth of God before Christianity knew anything of scientific
theology. That the formulating of the truth of the New Testament
into a system has been helpful to some minds, there can be no doubt.
But the transposing of “truth as it is in Jesus” into a system has also
hindered some minds from getting at Christ Himself, they having
rested in the system, and only comprehend as much of Christ as they
could see through the system.
Thus, theological systems could cloud the lenses of one’s faith in Christ and
MacDonald felt that it was his job to clean the lens.
While it is obvious that he spoke negatively about these disciplines,
and even claimed not to espouse a particular belief system, to argue that he
did not have a philosophy or theology is simply nonsensical. Just because
MacDonald did not like the title of “philosopher” or “theologian” does not
mean that he was not one. If we are to take the words of Francis Schaeffer
seriously, we should argue that all rational beings are philosophers, “No
man can live without a worldview; therefore there is no man who is not
a philosopher” (Schaeffer 2001:4). The central difficulty with arguing
that MacDonald was not a theologian resides in the fact that in order for
MacDonald to be able to point out the falsity of any system, which he did on
many occasions, he must purport to know the truth. MacDonald argued this
point himself in his sermon ‘The Last Farthing,’ “. . . any system which tends
to persuade men that there is any salvation but that of becoming righteous
even as Jesus is righteous; that a man can be made good, as a good dog is
good, without his own willed share in the making; that a man is saved by
having his sins hidden under a robe of imputed righteousness—that system,
so far as this tendency, is of the devil and not of God. Thank God, not even
error shall injure the true of heart; it is not wickedness. They grow in the
truth, and as love casts out fear, so truth casts out falsehood” (MacDonald
2012a:125, italics mine).
This casting out of falsehood was the first step to replacing the
erroneous view of God with the truth. The difference between MacDonald
and his counterparts is that he would rather the reader seek the truth on
his own, rather than have MacDonald force-feed them his own personal
Religious and Philosophical Foundations 123
views. So, it is no surprise when he writes, “I know, however, that there
were words in it which found their way to my conscience; and, let men of
science or philosophy say what they will, the rousing of a man’s conscience
is the greatest event in his existence” (MacDonald 2009e:173). But for
MacDonald himself, his conscience had been raised, and he did, in fact,
purport to have a proper philosophical and theological underpinnings. The
simplest way of reporting this fact is to recognize when he, in fact, agreed
with certain scholars’ points of view. He states succinctly in the Tragedie
of Hamlet, “Note the unity of religion and philosophy in Hamlet: he takes
the one true position” (MacDonald 1885:265). Now he does not argue
this fact because he merely believes that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is correct
because he aligns with MacDonald, but even more importantly, he believes
that Hamlet aligns with God’s own philosophy. MacDonald stated, “Matter,
time, space, are all God’s, and whatever may become of our philosophies,
whatever he does with or in respect of time, place, and what we call matter,
his doing must be true in philosophy as well as fact” (MacDonald 2002:424).
Therefore, God has a philosophy, Hamlet aligned with this philosophy,
and MacDonald understands and agrees with this alignment. But in order
to make this assessment he must have concluded that he had the correct
philosophical and religious position in the first place. To give another
example of MacDonald’s affirmation of a philosophical position, take this
passage in England’s Antiphon, “Dr. Henry More was . . . chiefly known for
his mystical philosophy, which he cultivated in retirement at Cambridge, and
taught not only in prose, but in an elaborate, occasionally poetic poem . . .
Whatever may be thought of his theories, they belong at least to the highest
order of philosophy; and it will be seen from the poems I give that they must
have borne their part in lifting the soul of the man towards a lofty spiritual
condition of faith and fearlessness. The mystical philosophy seems to me safe
enough in the hands of a poet: with others it may degenerate into dank and
dusty materialism” (MacDonald 1996:223).
In the following pages, this researcher will proceed with the same
spirit as MacDonald in his elevation of Dr. More’s mystical philosophy.
Even while MacDonald occasionally downplayed the role of philosophy,
he absolutely asked and discussed questions of a metaphysical nature.
Adelheid Kegler goes so far to say that “MacDonald’s oeuvre is conceived
in a dynamic and dialectic analysis of the central problems of modern
philosophy” (Kegler 2003:19). MacDonald elucidated his philosophical
positions on reality, truth, and knowledge; specifically discussed in his Dish